Abstract
It has been 100 years since a German scientist named Fritz Haber came up with a large-scale way to convert more of the sea of nitrogen gas around us into a usable form1. Before then, how much food we could produce from the fields was largely down to how well we recycled manure and made use of the nitrogen-fixing magic produced by plants like peas and beans. Haber’s invention has allowed us to green the world’s increasingly exhausted fields and put food on the table of billions. A staggering two out of every five people alive today are thought to owe their continued existence to his process2, yet millions still go hungry, and producing enough food for the burgeoning human population of the 21st century will test how well we manage the limit for the use of this precious substance. To date, our record is not a good one.
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© 2015 Dave Reay
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Reay, D. (2015). A Brief History of Nitrogen. In: Nitrogen and Climate Change. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286963_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286963_2
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